The fantastic Ben Reeve and I have written a book chapter. It’s a review of the roles past, present and future, that bioluminescence may play in the growing field of synthetic biology.

How Synthetic Biology Will Reconsider Natural Bioluminescence and Its Applications is published in Bioluminescence: Fundamentals and Applications in Biotechnology this October. The book, and the chapter, are available to purchase from Springer.

If you prefer though, we are making a free preprint version available right here:

A little while ago I needed, at short notice, an orbital shaker to go inside a cell culture incubator. OpenOrbital was the resulting prototype. It worked well until the expensive shaker the lab had ordered arrived.

Longhand is a quick experiment I hacked together when I realised that I haven’t written anything longer than a few paragraphs out by hand for the past three years. Writing by hand, when you can’t add a new sentence in the middle of what you have already written, is a completely different experience to typing. This demo aims to capture some of that experience electronically. (Chrome only)

A man went to the zoo. All they had to exhibit was a dog. It was a shih tzu.

Hah.

This evening I wondered how many other jokes there were using the pattern “adjective + noun sounds like noun“. So I downloaded the CMU pronouncing dictionary, WordNet and cracked out a bit of Perl.(more…)